Captain’s Quarters has a post about Cuba, specifically the treatment of political prisoners there. Just to remove any doubt before I start, let me quote a little of the final paragraph with approval:
We can differ on how best to improve the lot of the Cuban people and prepare for the post-Castro era, but let no one be fooled into thinking that the ruling junta is anything other than a brutal, oppressive, and inhumane regime.
What he’s talking about is this quoted material:
Four dissidents freed this week after five years in inhumane conditions in a Cuban prison have revealed the dark side of Fidel Castro’s regime.
The four – José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, Omar Pernet Hernández, Alejandro González and Pedro Pablo Ãlvarez – described regular beatings, humiliation and arbitrary punishment with long periods of solitary confinement in cramped cells with cement beds.
Mr Castillo, 50, a journalist who wrote articles critical of the regime, told The Sunday Telegraph: “It was terrible. It was like being in a desert in which sometimes there is no water, there is no food, you are tortured and you are abused.
“This was not torture in the textbook way with electric prods, but it was cruel and degrading. They would beat you for no reason even when you were in hospital.
“At other times they would search you for no reason, stripping you bare and humiliating you. There was one particular commander at a jail in Santa Clara who seemed to take delight in handing out beatings to the prisoners.”
If I look back on the last 8 years and find one thing that saddens me more than anything else, it might just be this: When I moved to America such barbarism would have been disgusting; now it’s only the target of the barbarism that we can legitimately rail against.